Hockey team's tour may open doors in US

Chris Murphy, a talented young hockey player from Arlington, grew up playing games at the New England Sports Center in Marlborough, home rink of the Minuteman Flames AAA team Murphy played for as he rose through the ranks of youth hockey.

Actually, the Marlborough sports complex had four rinks, and has just opened a fifth.

Murphy's friend from Ukraine, Aleksandr "Pasha" Ponomar, has four or five rinks to play in, too -- in the entire country of 49 million people. There are actually eight or nine buildings with ice rinks in Ukraine, but about half don't have electricity.

"Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't," said Ponomar after his HC Druzhba'78 team scrimmaged Murphy's St. Sebastian's varsity earlier this week.

In 1991, when Ukraine became independent, the Russians stripped the country of its infrastructure as they pulled out. Kharkov, the second-largest city and home of the Druzhba'78 team, has had a huge decline in population, as jobs, possibilities, and hope left town on the heels of the Russians.

Murphy first met Ponomar and the Druzhba team when he was 10, when he and Dover's Sarah Parsons played with a Boston team at a summer tournament in Ottawa. The Ukrainian team had terrible equipment, he said, "but they don't complain at all. They're very motivated. Even when they come to the United States and see how kids live. I remember asking some of them, `Would you like to live here?' And they said, `No.' "

HC Druzhba'78, primarily players from the Ukrainian national under-18 team, has spent the last month crisscrossing New England and New York to play hockey. The tour was organized, in part, by Harvard great Gene Kinasewich, the 13th of 14 children of Ukrainian immigrants who settled in Edmonton.

The Druzhba'78 tour provides 17-year-olds from opposite sides of the world to play against one another.

Of course, Druzhba'78 does it better. The team began its tour by winning the championship of the New York International Hockey Cup in Albany and has blazed to a 19-1-2 record against top midget and high school teams.

Druzhba'78 was created by Ivan Pravilov in 1988 when the former national soccer player became smitten with hockey. The first group of 10-year-olds included NHL veteran Dainius Zubrus, who now helps provide financing.

Pravilov's teaching method, delivered in the East European tradition of discipline and demanded devotion, begins with skating. Concentrating on balance, Pravilov's players become masterful skaters, stroking on deep edges. One, Egor Egorov, pivots so sharply and deeply his skates are all but parallel to the ice. Furthermore, they can, as Kinasewich said, "stickhandle in a phone booth."

The Ukrainians bring an intensity, a somberness, to their sport that US kids do not have, perhaps because Pravilov rules their world. It is a world he is valiantly trying to open up. While his best players still covet a professional career, many of Pravilov's players want an education, a chance at college.

The changing political climate in Ukraine is as perplexing and as hopeful as New England weather. Reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko was elected president of the country after a court ordered rerun of a disputed election even as the Druzhba kids were in the US. "The country was freed in 1991," said Kinasewich, "and here we are in 2005, fighting this battle. If [Yushchenko] gets in, this country will come out of the ashes -- and these kids could be the driving force. Hockey is the vehicle, maybe."

Parsons, one of the brightest young stars in the women's game, has been accepted at Dartmouth, where she will play hockey. She is also a candidate for the US Olympic team. Her life is exploding with possibilities.

Lizaveta Ryabkina, the 17-year-old captain of Druzhba'78 who plays the same high-speed hockey her male teammates do, has never played with a girls' or women's team. Women don't play hockey in Ukraine.

Ryabkina hopes to come to the US for a postgraduate year, easing the path to college. Harvard is watching. The possibilities, once so limited, are beginning to appear.

The Parsons family has hosted the Ukrainians, who are billeted with host families throughout their US tour. The contrasts in circumstances are dramatic. "After knowing them for five years, then when they come back here and seeing them in your old clothes, that's probably the most awkward thing," said Parsons.

Still, some things are not so different: the cold, smooth ice; the scrape of steel blades digging in; the smell of the locker room as players strip off hockey pads with hundreds of days of sweat worn deep into the pads. Soon, Murphy and Ponomar, and Parsons and Ryabkina, may play on the same ice.